The Treaty: The gripping story of the negotiations that brought about Irish independence and led to the Civil War

by Gretchen Friemann

On the morning of 11 October 1921, the world's media watched as the most wanted man in Ireland bounded through the door of 10 Downing Street.

Moments later, the 'head of the murder gang' grasped the hands of the Prime Minister.

Such was the mind-bending melodrama of the events leading up to what is known in Ireland, very simply, as 'the Treaty' - a document that had been designed to end one violent conflict and soon gave rise to another. A century on from its signing, Gretchen Friemann has produced a gripping and definitive account of the negotiations, shining a fresh light on the complex politics and high-stakes bargaining that produced the agreement.

The Treaty is a stunningly vivid piece of narrative history that resonates across the intervening century to the age of Brexit. It is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand modern Ireland and the enduring complexities of British-Irish relations.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Ireland

288 pages, Hardcover

Published September 7, 2021

Reviews

[Christof · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein sehr gutes, aber auch sehr ausführliches Sachbuch über die britisch-irischen Verhandlungen im Jahr 1921, die zur Teilung Irland/Nordirland und zu einem irischen Bürgerkrieg geführt haben. Gewisse Vorkenntnisse sind erforderlich, um folgen zu können, aber dank Wikipedia ist das kein Problem. Das Buch ist ein echtes Liebhaberstück für historisch interessierte Leser, die es ganz genau wissen wollen.

[Zachary Barker · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I have signed my death warrant”
Michael Collins

At the end of the Irish War of Independence the British Government unexpectedly called a truce. The terms of the truce were ill defined and neither side really knew how long it would last. After some inconclusive meetings between Irish President Eamon De Valera and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George the two sides came to an impasse. This was until one day David Lloyd George decided to take the initiative; he invited the Irish over to Downing Street to negotiate a settlement to the conflict. The book follows the events around the negotiations for this treaty.

The author does well to set the scene and give a briefly and convincingly colour the cast of characters. David Lloyd George has picked a team of expert negotiators and hard right wing figureheads united in purpose. De Valera has picked a team that is divided personally and ideologically and hasn’t even been given firm positions. The Irish delegation was designated as “plenipotentionaries”, which meant that they technically had full powers of negotiations. But this came with one hell of a rub; De Valera insisted that any important decisions had to be ran through him and his cabinet before the negotiators agreed on anything.

The negotiations are described so vividly that you feel as out of place and bewildered as the Irish negotiators. Michael Collins, the infamous IRA leader, had fun causing a media spectacle by arriving separate from the delegation but for him it was all the way down hill from there. He begged and pleaded with De Valera not to be sent. He felt set up. And in many ways he was. The Irish arrived without many firm positions and the British controlled the format of the negotiations and subtly divided up the delegation to get what they wanted. Considering there was distrust between them, particularly between Michael Collins and Arthur Griffiths on one side and Erskine Childers on the other, this helped sow the seeds of more deadly divisions back home.
The author went to great lengths to convey how both sides were driven by forces on both sides, the Republicans and the die-hard unionist Tories, to satisfy their urges for maximalist positions. In this context disappointment was inevitable. Given that the power dynamic was on the British side, they were pretty much guaranteed to get most of what they wanted.

In conclusion I think this book did well to convey the way that all sides were under pressure for different reasons. And yet despite all of their efforts most of the principle participants personally did not do well out of the Treaty. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was championed by Michael Collins as not the freedom the Irish deserved, but a stepping stone to one day achieve that freedom. But he was assassinated in the Irish countryside before he was in his mid 30s. Prime Minister David Lloyd George staked his political survival on the treaty, yet he was politically dead in months when the 1922 Committee of Conservatives was born and revolted against his government. Winston Churchill entered his wilderness years but left the negotiations with a warrior like respect for Michael Collins and attended his funeral.

While the personal consequences of the main actors are well outlined, the political aftermath is oddly hurriedly accounted for at the end of the book. This seems a bit of a cop out since “The Treaty” as it is known in Ireland has reverberated throughout it’s modern history. Did Collins and Griffiths sell Ireland out? Did De Valera send Collins to his death to save his political career? Was David Lloyd George really ever prepared to trap Ulster in an All Ireland Parliament? These questions are debated to this day.

[Fred Clough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I had already read a fair bit of Irish history concerning the Treaty negotiations, this book particularly clarified how much Lloyd George was constrained in the negotiations, firstly by the diehard Unionists whose support in government he relied upon, and for whom any measure of Irish independence was anathema, and secondly by the independence movements gathering strength in India and Egypt: a republic at the heart of the British Empire, it was felt, could only encourage separatist movements elsewhere in the Empire and hasten its demise. The treatment of the negotiations is detailed and well referenced, and the author is careful to indicate where there are conflicting accounts of crucial stages in the negotiations. It is also a largely even handed treatment of a topic which is so often an occasion for polemic and propaganda in place of history. Some judgements in the final chapter might be questioned. His statement, for example, that De Valera was largely responsible for 'the dimensions if not the fact of the civil war' is at the least disingenuous. The civil war was started by a Free State army, created and armed by Britain, who insisted that the Free State government open hostilities against the republicans occupying the Four Courts, and continued to support the prosecution of the war (since the republican cause was an obvious threat to the Treaty they had so laboriously imposed) until the opposing side laid down their arms. The republicans led by De Valera were simply holding fast to the mandate given by the overwhelming success in the 1918 general election of Sinn Fein, who openly campaigned on the basis of the creation of an Irish republic separate from Britain. Like so much in this world created in the crucible of the post-WW1 years, the Irish conflicts covered in this book are still with us, as the current Fianna Fail gradually retreats from the republican principles which were its original raison d'être, and cedes ground to a reborn Sinn Fein.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to put a star review on a work of history since it's not like I'm well-versed academically to critique its scholarship, and nor am I expecting a subject I know very well to be newly illuminated to a significant degree. That violence seemed an inevitable outcome was certainly interesting to ruminate on...is that the fate of all historical events—violence, on some level, contained to some degree or let loose?

Considering Ireland's development in the last 25 or so years — the great secular shift resulting from backlash to the abuses of the Catholic Church — it is much harder to buy into the heroics of the men who fought for Ireland's freedom considering that freedom was, as Unionists put it, 'Rome Rule'. An easy position to adopt is to be full-throated in support for Palestine, seeing the horrors in Gaza as analogous for the struggle for Irish independence, but the more one considers this the harder it is to justify...but then, it is no good to critique a certain narrative if I have no narrative of my own. Just cause I think the guys from Kneecap are blinkered doesn't mean they aren't on the side of the lesser evil.

Even my discomfort for the imposition of religious logic on a society does not suggest I prefer alternative visions of a nation... Thankfully, in the future there will be no need for political philosophy and thoughts of how a nation should be, as we will all be governed by AI and shepherded through meaningless lives of servitude from the cradle to the grave. All assuming it works.

[Stephen Morrissey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Treaty negotiations are one of the last things you would expect to be the subject of a great history book: flooded with legal minutiae and largely absent of the metallic clanging and militaristic chivalry of wars, treaties occupy a place in our culture akin to dental procedures - something that must be done, painfully and unwillingly, after a long bout of pain and putting off the date. Friemann somehow shuffles off those handicaps and has penned an illuminating and thrilling portrait of the negotiations between Great Britain and Ireland in the early 1920s over the separation of Ireland into Dominion status, and eventually, long after the treaty, full independence.

The narrative is carried along with the colorful cast of characters, primarily David Lloyd George, a bombastic outsider every bit as thrilling and results-oriented as figures like Lyndon Johnson in the United States. On the other side of the table, men like Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins occupy the tragic end of the tale, with Eamon de Valera haunting the scene from the background of Dublin. Whether the treaty itself was a success or waste of time, it surely caught the attention of the British public in a way Ireland has not since its nominal independence. As for Ireland, the treaty opened up wounds that festered into a civil war, and offer poignant examples of how debilitating peace may sometimes come.

[Adriana Moura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't expect too much from this book because I had already been warned, but I did hoped that it would shed some new lights on the Treaty negotiations, given that the masterpiece about this event Peace by Ordeal", was written over 80 years ago and several new sources appeared since. I was grossly disappointed. Not only the author keeps perpetuating myths - often without a single source to back really extraordinary claims, or worse, distorting sources she indeed consulted to maintain a certain view, what happens several times in the last chapter and creates doubts about his handling of sources in the rest of the book - but she brings little of new to the debate about that critical moment in Irish History. If on one hand bringing the British perspective allows a more balanced view of the negotiations, the excessive focus on it, in detriment to the Irish side, makes the bulk of the book repetitive and tiresome without clarifying much about how the developments came to be. The cherry of the cake, for me, was in the penultimate page, by using a highly questionable book as a valid source for a debatable event.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fairly detailed account of the background and events of the closing days of the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Treaty negotiations to establish the Irish Free State.

A lot of the book takes from primary sources so you get a good insight into the musings and feelings of the time and some of the more intricate details - for some this might make the book too minute or forensic, but I think it gives a good broad overview with bursts of focus throughout - I learnt things I hadn’t before, and it’s really highlighted to me the ragtag nature of the Irish negotiations- but made me all the more proud that I now live in a prosperous democratic state which began all the way back when - that many of these key players had a role in.

[Irl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to how Irish independence was secured. Free-flowing account of very turbulent times for Ireland. Friemann has masterly woven primary sources and lots of secondary sources to bring this account to life. Plenty of footnotes to guide supplementary reading after. My first real insight into this period.

[Iain Snelling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and detailed account of the treaty negotiations. The detail is a little difficult to follow, trying to understand how the key issues were highlighted and explored and how the dynamics in the negotiating teams, particularly the Irish team, played out. I knew about some of the negotiators but not all of them so trying to keep up was a challenge. On the big picture some very interesting themes: the challenges the Irish delegation had of negotiating with de Valera and the cabinet, the British threat of war on a new scale, and the position of Ulster, who had already secured an opt out. I’m sure this will be a book of reference in the future for me.

[Mal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gripping stuff and should be on anyone's centenary reading list. My only criticism is that the author, to my mind anyway, all too often brushes over the fact that the Irish delegation essentially had no real hand to play during the negotiations. They all signed that document under very real duress. Lloyd George's question of "Which of the two letters do I send?", with a deadline of three hours to sign, is probably the most telling moment described in the book. It's easy to state with hindsight that discussions around the North could have been better handled, but with the Tories in league with Ulster's die-hard Unionists, it's likely there was never going to be any real shift in the outcome.